Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Final Project: Female Ad Elements

Comm 852

Final Project

Female Ad Elements

By Jenny Green and Maria Hermosa

The use of sex and beauty are predominant elements of
most advertisements portraying females, according to Jean Kilbourne. However,
are those the only elements predominant in the ads? Are there any significant
differences in ads portraying females depending on the type of magazine? Are
there common patterns? With this project, we wanted to dig in to answer those
questions while expanding and challenging the notions that Jean Kilbourne
presented in her different works. For this reason, we looked at four various magazine
categories (business, lifestyle, fashion and fitness) with advertisements that’s
primary focus was a female. We then created our own scoring sheet that provided
us a quantitative insight about the following seven elements:environment of the advertisement, company of
the female, posture of the female, type of clothing, amount of clothing, diversity/ethnicity
of the female and wording of the message. We chose to use a quantitative
measurement to find similar patterns or contrasting ones among the different
magazines.

We believe
this project provided us with some interesting insights about the topic and
might complement and support a better understanding of Jean Kilbourne thoughts.
In addition, we think this scoring sheet method could be improved and
replicated in a much broader study. After analyzing 200 advertisements (50
within five magazines from each category) we drew interesting conclusions about
female stereotypes and specific element patterns.These conclusions are shown in this video
that we hope you enjoy, critique and learn from!